The Devil’s Cocktail: A Tale of Glass, Flint, and Royal Curiosity

Picture this: It’s the 1740s, and the Royal Society – that illustrious club of powdered wigs and curious minds – is all abuzz about a devilish little contraption from Bologna, Italy. These aren’t your grandma’s pickle jars, oh no! These are Bologna bottles, also known as Bologna phials or philosophical vials, and they’re about to turn the world of glass on its head.

Now, you might be wondering, “What’s so special about a bottle?” Well, hold onto your tricorn hats, because these bottles are tougher than a two-dollar steak! You could use one to hammer nails into wood without so much as a crack. But here’s the kicker – drop a tiny piece of flint inside, and KABOOM! The whole thing explodes like a miniature glass grenade.

How does this sorcery work, you ask? It’s all thanks to some crafty Italian glassblowers who decided to play fast and loose with the rules of annealing. Instead of babying their bottles in a nice, warm furnace, they left them out in the cold, cruel world. This created a glass with more tension than a Royal Society meeting discussing the shape of the Earth.

But let’s not forget our unsung hero in this tale – the humble flint. That’s right, the same rock our ancestors used to start fires and make arrowheads is the Achilles’ heel of these seemingly indestructible bottles. It’s like David versus Goliath, if David were a pebble and Goliath were a really tough water bottle.

Fast forward to today, and these Bologna bottles are still blowing minds (and themselves) in science classrooms and magic shows around the world. They’re like the James Bond of glassware – elegant, mysterious, and prone to explosive endings. So next time you’re sipping from a glass bottle, give a little nod to those mad Italian glassblowers and their flint-fearing creation. Just maybe don’t try to recreate the experiment at home, unless you fancy spending your evening picking glass shards out of your carpet!

The effect is utilized in several magic effects, including the “Devil’s Flask”.

Sources

1. Cooley, Arnold James (1854). A cyclopaedia of six thousand practical receipts, and collateral information in the arts manufactures, and trades including medicine, pharmacy, and domestic economy: Designed as a compendious book of reference for the manufacturer, tradesman, amateur, and heads of families. D. Appleton & Co. pp. 124. making Bologna Vials.
2. Knight, Edward Henry (1876). Knight’s American mechanical dictionary: A description of tools, instruments, machines, processes, and engineering; history of inventions; general technological vocabulary; and digest of mechanical appliances in science and the arts. Hurd and Houghton. p. 110.
3. Eggert, Gerhard (2007). “Hot Glass, Cold Water: Experiments in the History of Glass Fracture”. Interim Meeting of the ICOM-CC Working Group: 8–13.
4. “How Things Work”. p. 135. Archived from the original on 16 February 2017. Retrieved 15 February 2017. The bottle is tempered in such a way that the outside surface is experiencing compression and the inside surface is experiencing tensile stress. Since it is very hard to start a tear in a layer that is being compressed, it is hard to tear the outside of the bologna bottle. But the inside is under tension and the slightest injury to it will cause the surface to tear itself to shreds.
5. Instagram. “A Bologna bottle, also known as a Bologna phial or philosophical…”
6. Kiddle. “Bologna bottle Facts for Kids”
7. The Locomotive, Volume 6. Hartford Steam Broiler Inspection and Insurance Co. 1885. p. 158.
8. The New American Ecyclopædia, ed. by G. Ripley and C.A. Dana. Beam-Browning. 1859. p. 450.
9. The Philosophical Transactions and Collections – Royal society of London: Abridged and Disposed Under General Heads, Volume 10 (1743-1750). p. 1343
10. “1913 Websters Dictionary via hyperdictionary.com”. 1913 Websters Dictionary. Archived from the original on 2008-08-21. Retrieved 2011-10-17.
11. Wikipedia. “Bologna bottle.”
12. YouTube. “Bologna Bottle and Glass Demonstration – www.propdog.co.uk”